Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

astroengine writes "Hubble has observed some weird things since it was launched in 1990, but this is probably one of the strangest. In September 2013, the Catalina and Pan-STARRS sky surveys spotted a mysterious object in the asteroid belt, a region of rocky debris that occupy the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Follow-up observations by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii resolved three separate objects within the fuzzy cloud. It was so strange that Hubble mission managers decided to use the space telescope to get a closer look. And what they saw has baffled and thrilled astronomers in equal measure. 'This is a really bizarre thing to observe — we've never seen anything like it before,' said co-author Jessica Agarwal of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany. 'The break-up could have many different causes, but the Hubble observations are detailed enough that we can actually pinpoint the process responsible.'"

Nope, no OSHA, no patents, no trademarks. They're also so advanced that we look like dirt. When they finally do come here to do trade with us they'll laugh at our backward ways, all the time our Legions o' Lawyers try to find some means of making them do business our way, despite them having everything we want and us having nothing they want (aside from puree of Bieber.)

The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has more material than any of the inner planets. It's a fascinating debate as to they ever were part of a single planet, or never coalesced into a single object due to the gravitational perturbation of Jupiter (any large planetlets would have been thrown out of orbit).

"The images clearly showed a golden three-headed space dragon emerge from the cloud of debris. The eerie, high-pitched laughter of an alien demon filled the NASA command center before a bolt of gold space-lightning took out the Hubble telescope."